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Online Fact-Checking Tool Gets a Big Test with Nepal Earthquake

An organization crowdsources the verification of rumors on social media in the Nepal disaster zone.

There are huge numbers of social media reports after a disaster, and relief workers urgently need to determine whether or not they’re true.

Shortly after a 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit Nepal on Saturday, social media services lit up with unverified reports of people trapped and buildings damaged. But how could humanitarian organizations know where to respond first? How could they know which accounts were actually true?

To weed out false rumors that can waste precious time, Justine Mackinnon has enlisted some local volunteers to use an experimental Web tool to crowdsource rumor verification as quickly as possible.

Often, a large number of tweets coming from the same place and reporting the same general thing is enough verification, says Mackinnon. But sometimes the team encounters tweets “that don’t quite fit” with what the crowd is saying. Often these are untrue, but it is crucial that they be verified as quickly as possible in case they contain vital information. To do this, her group posts a “verification request,” in the form of a yes or no question, on a new Web platform called Verily (see “Preventing Misinformation from Spreading Through Social Media”).

Users can go to Verily’s website and read short tutorials on simple, established ways to verify things like the source of an image or the date and location of a report on a social network. They can answer yes-or-no verification questions about reports, provided they supply a piece of evidence supporting their answer—a corroborating photo, for example. Users can also share verification requests with their own social networks. Based on the evidence posted by Verily users, Mackinnon’s team can pass information along to relief organizations. The idea is to “crowdsource critical thinking,” says Patrick Meier, one of the creators of the tool and a co-founder of Standby Task Force.

Tools like Verily are only powerful if lots of people use them, and Mackinnon says that building a community has been the biggest challenge in Nepal, as well as during the first trial of the platform after a cyclone hit the nation of Vanuatu in March. For the past couple of days, the team has been teaching some 200 Nepali volunteers how to use the platform, with the hope that they can recruit others from their personal networks.

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I’m an associate editor at MIT Technology Review, focusing on the world of cryptocurrencies and blockchains. My reporting, which includes a twice-weekly, blockchain-focused email newsletter, Chain Letter… More (subscribe here), revolves around one central question: Why does blockchain technology matter?

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